Property developer Andrew Montgomerie is on trial in the Auckland District Court, accused of having wounded another man at a 2021 cocktail party in Westmere. Photo composite / Alyse Wright and NZ Police
Almost immediately after property developer Andrew Montgomerie smashed a glass of vodka soda on to a colleague’s neck amid “banter” about unpaid bills, he and his partner left the Westmere party where they had spent the evening socialising.
CCTV showed the couple walking out the front door of the seaside mansion as a crowd started to gather in the background behind them, encircling a man who, according to witnesses, had been yelling for help and bleeding profusely from the neck.
Another party-goer could be seen following the couple out of the house. He recalled yelling for them to stop, but got no reply.
Amid all that commotion, both Montgomerie and his partner adamantly and repeatedly insisted while under oath today that they did not realise the other man had been injured until they saw a TV news alert later that night about a “champagne shanking”.
The swift exit was absolutely not an attempt to avoid authorities, both replied as prosecutors suggested otherwise.
Montgomerie, 58, has been on trial since last week, accused of wounding with reckless disregard for the safety of others. The complainant, who also works in the property development industry, cannot currently be named because of a pending request for permanent name suppression.
Montgomerie acknowledged at the outset of the trial that he caused the injury that resulted in the man needing surgery at Auckland Hospital. But it was an accident so unexpected that he didn’t even realise it had happened, the Ponsonby resident has said.
In the witness box today, the defendant recalled the other man approaching him and saying hello. He was surprised the other man wanted to shake hands, given the rumours the man had been spreading for years, he acknowledged saying aloud.
Montgomerie wasn’t resentful about the rumours regarding him cheating contractors, he said, suggesting he blew the comments off because “everybody knows what [the complainant] is like”. But “it seemed an opportune time to bring it up”, he explained.
The two then traded insults, which Montgomerie said he thought of at the time as “light ribbing” and “banter” rather than an argument.
“He was looking a little bit agitated,” Montgomerie said, explaining that he turned and walked several steps away because “it wasn’t appropriate” to make a scene in front of a house full of friends. “He was following me, and when I stopped and turned around he was in my face.”
Jurors heard testimony from the complainant last week in which he said he was the one who started to walk away before Montgomerie told him to turn around and say the rumours to his face. Montgomerie denied that happened.
As the two faced off the second time, Montgomerie said he could see the other man tense up.
“I could see his right arm begin to move and I ... defensively and instantly raised my right arm,” he recalled to jurors, explaining that the other man’s hand raised “maybe a couple of hundred millimetres” before Montgomerie sprang into action. “It looked like he was going to throw a punch at me and it was a defensive blocking move.”
He repeatedly described the incident as having happened in a confusing “split second”. The other man, he said, “looks at me a little bit longer and walks away” without saying a word.
“There was no indication that I hit him, that I connected, that I had injured him in any way,” he insisted. “I didn’t see him hold his neck. I was standing there trying to figure out what happened. I was very surprised.”
The defendant said he didn’t ever remember the glass breaking and had no idea his hand also had been cut until he returned home. But he suggested the “flash, upmarket glass” used by the caterers at the party was “light and fine” and could have shattered easily.
A short time later, a caterer came up to Montgomerie and said he would clean up the glass shards. Something was mentioned about a “kerfuffle in the kitchen”, Montgomerie said, but he still had no inkling it was related to what had just happened.
“We didn’t want any fuss,” he said of the sudden decision to leave the party. “We were happy to leave.”
The couple didn’t notice the crowd starting to gather around the other man as they stepped out and didn’t hear the other party-goer yelling for them to stop as they walked down the street towards their Uber, the defendant and his partner both insisted.
He didn’t do anything that night when hearing about the “champagne shanking” at the same party he had just left but decided to call a friend who is a lawyer the next day, he said, because of some of the “outrageous allegations” he was seeing in the media.
“I knew I didn’t drink champagne,” he explained. “I’m thinking about the incident, the accident and how it was being made a lot bigger and sensationalised in the press, and that was pretty annoying.
“... It was a pretty awful experience. I was somewhat bewildered. It just wasn’t true.”
Montgomerie’s evidence was broken into numerous sections divided by 10-minute breaks, and the lights were dimmed near the witness box. That was because he had suffered an unrelated head injury in a fall some time after the 2021 party, defence lawyer Ron Mansfield, KC, told jurors.
During cross-examination of the defendant, Crown prosecutor Ruby van Boheemen suggested that many aspects of Montgomerie’s account were either inconsistent with his previous statements or simply made “absolutely no sense”.
For instance, she suggested, if Montgomerie truly intended to block a blow from the other man’s right hand it doesn’t make sense that the left side of the other man’s neck was injured. It also would have made more sense, she suggested, for Montgomerie to use his empty left hand to block a blow thought to be coming from his left side.
“This all happened in a microsecond,” Montgomerie replied.
Van Boheemen also suggested it beggared belief that the man’s injury – 2.5cm deep and about 5cm long – wouldn’t have been noticed before Montgomerie left the party. It also made no sense, she said, that Montgomerie wouldn’t have noticed his own hand injury from the shattered glass.
“It wasn’t accidental, Mr Montgomerie. It was an intentional and forceful strike to [the other man’s] neck, wasn’t it?” she asked. “You aimed at [his] neck with your glass, didn’t you, when he wasn’t looking?”
Montgomerie denied it.
“Why would I want to hurt him?” he asked in return, reminding the prosecutor of the party full of peers.
Van Boheemen pointed to a text message Montgomerie sent another friend the next day in which he explained: “The guy punched me and came off second best and is now crying about it.”
She said his story changed again several days later when Montgomerie gave a typed seven-sentence statement to police stating: “As I was walking away he threw a punch towards my head.
“He walked back towards a group of people,” the statement continued. “I then realised my right hand was bleeding badly and realised I had a spirits glass in my hand which had smashed.”
It didn’t match today’s testimony, van Boheemen noted, that there was no actual punch and that Montgomerie wasn’t aware of his own injury until after the party.
“Look, I’m not much of a texter,” the defendant said, conceding later that the description of a thrown punch was “indelicately put”.
The signed police statement, which he gave instead of a full interview, was drafted by his lawyer at the time and was intended only to be a “high-level” abbreviation of events rather than a full account of what happened, he said.
“You oversold his actions to police?” the prosecutor asked.
“It’s slightly different, but subtly,” he responded.
Van Boheemen pressed on.
“It would have been very clear to you after the incident that something was seriously wrong with [the complainant],” she said. “That’s why you left the party, isn’t it?
“A suggestion otherwise is just absolutely ridiculous, isn’t it?”
Montgomerie, appearing to lose patience, disagreed. He had already answered the question, he said.
Judge Paul Murray told jurors that they were likely to begin deliberations tomorrow, after closing addresses.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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